Politics and Divinization in Augustan Poetry
Politics and Divinization in Augustan Poetry

Author: Bobby Xinyue

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-06-02

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 019266848X

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Politics and Divinization in Augustan Poetry offers a new interpretation of one of the most prominent themes in Latin poetry, the divinization of Augustus, and argues that this theme functioned as a language of political science for the early Augustan poets as they tried to come to terms with Rome's transformation from Republic to Principate. Examining an extensive body of texts ranging from Virgil's Eclogues to Horace's final book of the Odes (covering a period roughly from 43 BC to 13 BC), this study highlights the multifaceted metaphorical force of divinizing language, as well as the cultural complications of divinization. Through a series of close readings, this book challenges the view that poetic images of Augustus' divinization merely reflect the poets' attitude towards Augustus or their recognition of his power, and puts forward a new understanding of this motif as an evolving discourse through which the first generation of Augustan poets articulated, interrogated, and negotiated Rome's shift towards authoritarianism.

Politics and Divinization in Augustan Poetry
Politics and Divinization in Augustan Poetry

Author: Bobby Xinyue

Publisher:

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780191946288

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This book offers a new interpretation of one of most prominent themes in Latin poetry, the divinization of Augustus, and argues that this theme functioned as a language of political science for the early Augustan poets as they tried to come to terms with Rome's transformation from Republic to Principate. Examining an extensive body of texts ranging from Virgil's Eclogues to Horace's final book of the Odes (covering a period roughly from 43 BC to 13 BC), this study highlights the multifaceted metaphorical force of divinizing language, as well as the cultural complications of divinization. Through a series of close readings, this book challenges the view that poetic images of Augustus' divinization merely reflect the poets' attitude towards Augustus or their recognition of his power, and puts forward a new understanding of this motif as an evolving discourse through which the first generation of Augustan poets articulated, interrogated, and negotiated Rome's shift towards authoritarianism.

Essays on Propertian and Ovidian Elegy
Essays on Propertian and Ovidian Elegy

Author:

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-01-17

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 019890813X

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This volume brings together eleven chapters on the genre of Latin elegy by leading scholars in the field. Latin elegy is typically thought to have flourished for a brief period at Rome between c. 40 BC and the early decades of the first century AD; it was the pre-eminent vehicle for writing about amatory matters in this period and among its principal exponents were Propertius and Ovid, whose works constitute the focus of this volume. Their poems and poetic collections were, however, by no means restricted to the themes of love, even if amatory concerns often surface at unexpected moments in texts that are not ostensibly concerned with love. Both poets were alive to their precursors' writings in elegiacs, and so aetiological themes and reflection on contemporary political circumstances form an integral part of their poetry. Such concerns are explored in some of the chapters on Propertius, on Ovid's Fasti and exile poetry, and also in a Renaissance elegy that looks closely to its literary heritage as it comments on the concerns of its day. Some contributions to this volume also shed new light on the typically elegiac conceit of separation, notably in amatory and exilic texts, while others look to conceptions of Roman identity and the relationship between the natural world and the cultural, political and literary spheres. All of the chapters share an interest in the close-reading of texts as the basis for drawing broader conclusions about these fascinating authors, their poetry, and their worlds.

An Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry by Classical Scholars
An Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry by Classical Scholars

Author: Stephen Harrison

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-01-11

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1350379476

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Presenting a range of Neo-Latin poems written by distinguished classical scholars across Europe from c. 1490 to c. 1900, this anthology includes a selection of celebrated names in the history of scholarship. Individual chapters present the Neo-Latin poems alongside new English translations (usually the first) and accompanying introductions and commentaries that annotate these verses for a modern readership, and contextualise them within the careers of their authors and the history of classical scholarship in the Renaissance and early modern period. An appealing feature of Renaissance and early modern Latinity is the composition of fine Neo-Latin poetry by major classical scholars, and the interface between this creative work and their scholarly research. In some cases, the two are actually combined in the same work. In others, the creative composition and scholarship accompany each other along parallel tracks, when scholars are moved to write their own verse in the style of the subjects of their academic endeavours. In still further cases, early modern scholars produced fine Latin verse as a result of the act of translation, as they attempted to render ancient Greek poetry in a fitting poetic form for their contemporary readers of Latin.

Ambiguity and Religion in Ovid's Fasti
Ambiguity and Religion in Ovid's Fasti

Author: Darja Šterbenc Erker

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 9004527044

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Ovid's Fasti comments on Augustan religion by means of ambivalent aetiologies, elegiac jokes and subtle allusions to the religious self-fashioning of the imperial family. Darja Sterbenc Erker carefully reconstructs Ovid's subtle unmasking of religious fundaments of Augustus' principate.

Reflections and New Perspectives on Virgil's Georgics
Reflections and New Perspectives on Virgil's Georgics

Author: Nicholas Freer

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-02-21

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1350070521

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Virgil's Georgics, the most neglected of the poet's three major works, is brought to life and infused with fresh meanings in this dynamic collection of new readings. The Georgics is shown to be a rich field of inherited and varied literary forms, actively inviting a wide range of interpretations as well as deep reflection on its place within the tradition of didactic poetry. The essays contained in this volume – contributed by scholars from Australia, Europe and North America – offer new approaches and interpretive methods that greatly enhance our understanding of Virgil's poem. In the process, they unearth an array of literary and philosophical sources which exerted a rich influence on the Georgics but whose impact has hitherto been underestimated in scholarship. A second goal of the volume is to examine how the Georgics – with its profound meditations on humankind, nature, and the socio-political world of its creation – has been (re)interpreted and appropriated by readers and critics from antiquity to the modern era. The volume opens up a number of exciting new research avenues for the study of the reception of the Georgics by highlighting the myriad ways in which the poem has been understood by ancient readers, early modern poets, explorers of the 'New World', and female translators of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Poetics of Power in Augustan Rome
The Poetics of Power in Augustan Rome

Author: Nandini B. Pandey

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-10-11

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1108422659

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Explores the dynamic interactions among Latin poets, artists, and audiences in constructing and critiquing imperial power in Augustan Rome.

Heaven Is Empty
Heaven Is Empty

Author: Filippo Marsili

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2018-11-01

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1438472013

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Offers a new perspective on the relationship between religion and the creation of the first Chinese empires. Heaven Is Empty offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of China’s early empires (221 BCE–9 CE) and shows how the unification of the Central States was possible without a unitary and universalistic conception of religion. The cohesive function of the ancient Mediterranean cult of the divinized ruler was crucial for the legitimization of Rome’s empire across geographical and social boundaries. Eventually reelaborated in Christian terms, it came to embody the timelessness and universality of Western conceptions of legitimate authority, while representing an analytical template for studying other ancient empires. Filippo Marsili challenges such approaches in his examination of the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han (141–87 BCE). Wu purposely drew from regional traditions and tried to gain the support of local communities through his patronage of local cults. He was interested in rituals that envisioned the monarch as a military leader, who directly controlled the land and its resources, as a means for legitimizing radical administrative and economic centralization. In reconstructing this imperial model, Marsilire interprets fragmentary official accounts in light of material evidence and noncanonical and recently excavated texts. In bringing to life the courts, battlefields, markets, shrines, and pleasure quarters of early imperial China, Heaven Is Empty provides a postmodern and postcolonial reassessment of “religion” before the arrival of Buddhism and challenges the application of Greco-Roman and Abrahamic systemic, identitary, and exclusionary notions of the “sacred” to the analysis of pre-Christian and non-Western realities. “Heaven Is Empty is a tour de force. It reveals Marsili’s bold vision of early Chinese religion and his deft use of critical theory. The book will inspire scholars of early China for generations to come.” — Miranda Brown, author of The Politics of Mourning in Early China and The Art of Medicine in Early China: The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive

Ovid in Exile
Ovid in Exile

Author: Matthew McGowan

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2009-04-15

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9047424077

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In response to being exiled to the Black Sea by the Roman emperor Augustus in 8 AD, Ovid began to compose the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto and to create for himself a place of intellectual refuge. From there he was able to reflect out loud on how and why his own art had been legally banned and left for dead on the margins of the empire. As the last of the Augustan poets, Ovid was in a unique position to take stock of his own standing and of the place of poetry itself in a culture deeply restructured during the lengthy rule of Rome's first emperor. This study considers exile in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto as a place of genuine suffering and a metaphor for poetry's marginalization from the imperial city. It analyzes, in particular, Ovid's representation of himself and the emperor Augustus against the background of Roman religion, law, and poetry.